[rigorman]

Advertising - including subsets of advertising like including models or playing on insecurities - is only a small subset of the discipline of "Marketing". Most of Marketing is about finding out what people want and need, how to deliver it, and how to let people know your delivery of their need-fulfillment is available.

Gimmicks are only needed if you can't figure out what people need or can't deliver it.

Bringing this up because Silicon Valley would be building much better products if our venture-funded companies hired marketers - not marketers who work on advertisements, social media, etc, I know we hire plenty of those - But the kind of marketers who rigorously research consumer needs and creatively find ways the technical capacity of companies can be deployed to meet those needs. User testing is only a small subset of market research, and it's sloppy, lazy, and ultimately very shortsighted to limit market research to user testing and data mining.